Dis-located Bodies: Dao and Deep Reality in Embodied Experience

Abstract

This paper addresses the problems of the totality of Euro-American rationalist thinking that often dis-locates embodied thought and being through a consensus of scientific management and amusement. The culture of consensus perpetuates non- thinking being through the eradication of individuality in a totality. The realization of this tranquilized familiarity is a product of deep reality: the reflection of cultural practices, norms, and epistemologies that existentially affect one’s life revealed through the investigation of those very practices, norms, and epistemologies that underlie most cultural assumptions. Access to deep reality reveals the phenomenology of apathy. Examining the consensus of being that rationalist thought dictates and learning from other forms of knowledge such as Daoist philosophy alongside Euro-American thought offers a way of being on the periphery of rationalist thought that resists subsumption. Deep reality takes into consideration that other modes of thinking and being harmonize the mind/body dis-location: it is a way of thinking that attempts to expand beyond the Eurocentric philosophical tradition. Revealing from the periphery that commonality is more present than absent, dis-location forms the realization that the mastery of rationalist thought is alienated from itself, demonstrating that it is one mode of thinking among many that is in constant transformation.

KEYWORDS: deep reality, rationalist thought, philosophical Daoism, dis-location, embodiment, apathy